Identity
by Josie Smith
Summary: Drabbles, loosely tied together into one vague story arc. Every chapter is a short excercise in characterization.
1. Palutena speaks

My name is not Palutena.

My real name is ineffable, unpronounceable, and unspeakable by your mortal tonges. You have your different translations, all with different numbers of your earthly syllables. None (except maybe a few) come close. I and all of my subjects are too divine to behold by the mortal eye (which is why they are represented, onscreen, at least, by flying green boogers. Why? Because that's what you look like to us, silly. Boogers that live short, useless lives.)

Only one is seriously retarded enough to live among you.

You've got to admit, he's come along quite nicely. In the two thousand years or so he's been dead, it's been obvious that he's never going to one of our great thinkers. Actually I doubt he has the capacity to fix an inclined plane. Letting him stay idle forever was clearly a waste, so we set him on another career path, a career that, after two thousand years, he has finally come to master.

…Shut up. You know perfectly well I could have gotten out of that myself if I absolutely had to.

Fine. I'll explain. Just for the record.

A while back, I got myself into a bit of a sticky patch with one of my cousins. (We have these family tiffs quite often, actually). In the end, she, err, captured all creatures living in my domain, including me, and shut them all up in, um, Hell.

Being hindered as I was, I only had strength to release one of my subjects. I chose him for his integrity, determination, and… and mostly because he was mute. You see, any sensible person with half a brain would have run to the rest of the family for help immediately, and I would never have heard the end of it. But he was the perfect choice. Not only does he have less than half a brain, but no one in my family understands sign language.

After he had done his bit, I had to reward him a bit. Keep him happy, you know, in case he ever learned to write.

(Yes, I know he has no problems down here. But we have different standards, a different language, and a different writing style. Depending on how good you've been, you may or may not understand later. Knowing you, probably not.)

Anyway, I offered him girls, money, fast cars, et cetera, but he didn't want those. I could have made his wings whole whole for a while, or temporarily turned him into a fish, or whatever the hell that kid really wants. But he didn't want any of that. He just wanted to speak. For good.

When an angel is born speechless or otherwise defective in any way, shape, orform, there's usually a reason. The old ones don't like it when you bend their rules, so this was the one thing I could not do. Besides making him a little smarter, I mean. That would be impossible, even without the old ones breathing over my shoulder.

I stalled quite a bit. He started threatening to get an interpreter, so I finally reached a solution.

I gave him a promotion, the Three Sacred Treasures, and a voice. Then I sent him down to you all where the old ones couldn't find him, he couldn't get to my family, and where he's probably fitting in much better anyhow. I bet he's annoying someone to death with his new voice right now. Oh, and although he has the promotion in name, someone else is doing the actual captaining of the Guard. Hee hee.

You may have seen him. He wears a tablecloth and doesn't comb his hair.

I bet with him that he couldn't pull it off. It appears that I have lost, and now I owe him money. I guess I'll have to pay it. After all, what's a little cash, between friends?

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**I love unreliable narrators. I also love the last lines- they make her look like less of a bitch.**

**3 Jodi**


	2. Pit, cleaning house in skyworld

He surveyed the possessions spread all over the bed with a critical eye; yes, they would all, somehow, have to fit in. Sighing deeply, he wondered how it had come to this. Him moving away? From the most perfect place that ever existed? Many people would kill to come live where he was living, and many people did.

Oh well. It was an adventure, right? It was exactly what he had spent 16-17 years wanting. It more or less was, anyway. Thanks to his marketing team, he had achieved incredible popularity- they had fought to get him the best designers, ad placement, all that guerilla stuff. Whatever it was. He owed those guys his career. Hey, nowadays there were lying commenters on the internet trying to impress people by saying they had hoped for his return, back in his dark ages. You had to be pretty good to have that going on. Right? Right!

Recklessly, he threw everything into his suitcase, Then he realized it didn't fit, took everything out, and put it all in again. It still didn't fit. He took everything out again, didn't have the will power to put it back, and just sat there playing with his pins. Or as Red had called them, Man-Brooches. Pit hadn't told him that they were quite necessary to hold his clothes up, thank you very much, because that would only lead to a lot of teasing about his clothes, and that wasn't worth explaining, not that he would believe him anyway, and—

What was he doing? Kid Icarus, sitting on the floor, arranging shiny things in a circle? No. That would never do. He jumped to his feet, and threw things into his suitcase with renewed vigor. Eventually, he managed to pack everything in, by knack of stuffing some of it in his cello case.

Pit surveyed his empty room. Most of the furniture had already been taken, along with most of his stuff. It was completely empty, except for a spartan bed and a couple of musical instruments lying in a pile, together with a sad little suitcase. And him. There was nothing in there that wouldn't be gone in a couple of hours. Tomorrow, there would be nothing left, except the peeling paint on the walls and a bit of dust.

Nothing left.

Pit thought he was going to cry.

Man up, he told himself, this is the best thing that's ever happened to you. Comeback- Kid- Icarus. His marketing team was beside itself with joy. This is what he had spent the last two decades fighting so hard to get. Carefully, he wiggled his wings thorough the shoulder straps on his cello. Suitcase in one hand, violin in the other… He was still going to cry, damnit.

Angry with himself, he charged out of the house without realizing what he was doing. Down in the elevator. Through the door. One foot in front of the other. He was halfway down the street before he realized what he was doing, and by then he had too much momentum to stop.

He was in the temple.

Palutena glanced at him. "How do I look?"

"Green hair doesn't really suit you." Said Pit slowly. The words sounded strange as they rolled off his tounge.

"As for you, you look smashing." She grinned wickedly.

"Haha. Funny. No puns today, please."

"No, really. The whole thing with the scarf and the underarmor and the safety pin is amazing. Beats your old blue towel by a mile."

"Oh shut up. Thanks to you, I'm wearing a tablecloth over a diving suit. And nothing," he said with mock gravity, humor he didn't feel "beats a towel."

"It wasn't completely my fault. Your marketing team said it had 'a classic look'. They seemed quite happy last time they saw it. And you agreed."

Pit made a sound halfway between a growl and an angry grunt.

"My, my, testy today, aren't we?" She gave him _that look_, and the floor moved beneath his feet, and suddenly he was dropping like a stone through the clouds, luggage and all. Oops. It wasn't wise to sass a goddess. He kept falling, falling, falling.

Except for one incident involving a Boeing 767, Pit did not attempt to control his fall. He fell, and he fell, until about a hundred stories above the ground. Opening his wings, he slowed his drop so that he wouldn't slam a hole in a drab, stained, six-story building. It would have been safer, he reflected, without the cello. After wobbling into the building, it took a few minutes to find his new apartment, and another five to figure out where he put his keys. In two seconds, he was collapsed on the couch-- with completely dry eyes, of course.

**I thought I was done last chapter, but… well….**

**Right now, I'm planning to make this into a series of drabbles, or maybe exercises in characterization. Including a really loose plot arc. Don't worry, this will be the last one about Pit. **

**A couple of notes: **

**Pit made a cameo appearance in Tetris, playing the violin, and another game, -----, playing the cello. **

**I don't know if he actually cries at the end.**

**He's such a girl, isn't he?**

**Blatant Hitchhiker reference!**

**IF YOU HAVE THE ATTENTION SPAN TO READ THIS FAR, YOU HAVE THE ATTENTION SPAN TO REVIEW! **


	3. Red Hallucinates

Do I really belong here?

There are a thousand and one things wrong with my job, and people would have to be stupid not to notice. And no, I'm not stupid. Don't look at me like that, because I'm not insecure, either.

You don't survive in the wild alone, just a little bit after your tenth birthday (hiking across tick-infested grasslands and whatnot the whole time), by angsting about it. When you boss around beasts that could kill you without trying, if they wanted, you can't be insecure. You definitely can't become the best of the best when you're stupid. I'm not stupid. I'm not insecure. And I definitely don't angst (not that much, anyway).

So when I say I don't belong, you know I'm telling the truth. I'm just so different. The rest of them are a lot of aliens, furries, a smattering of royalty, some sentient exercise balls, bounty hunters, and NASCAR fans, so I guess you're thinking that I must be pretty weird to stand out.

I'm not, and that's just it. I'm a guy with a few pets. There's nothing special about me.

What got me thinking about all this, you say? It was the hazing.

They rang the doorbell, popped a bag over my head, and tied me to a chair. Then, they carried me into a van (I think it was a van) and drove off somewhere. I was waiting in there a long time, and guessed it was because they just wanted me to sweat a little. When the door did open, I could hear and feel the soft whoosh of a spell as it was released and settled over the room. Nothing else seemed to happen, but that was probably part of the spell. I waited.

Someone pulled the bag off my head. After blinking the blinding sunlight out of my eyes, I realized it was Mario. At the time, I thought he wanted me to fight him, but I didn't have any of my Pokemon with me.

"Sorry. Can't." I shrugged. He passed me my Pokeballs. "Hey! Where'd you get those?" They were definitely mine, no doubt about it.

No answer. I didn't really expect one. I was being hazed, after all, and I was under a spell. He just walked away, and I followed him. I felt like I was dreaming, and reminded myself that I probably was.

After a walking for a while (I don't know how long), we got to this flat, white space with no platforms or anything. There were only two dimensions there- up and down, and sideways. Where was the light coming from? There were no shadows, and nothing to cast them. It was just flat and white and completely impossible.

Bizarrely, Mario still wanted to fight, or so I thought. He flapped his cape a little, and I got out my Pokeballs. Wasting no time (better get the stupid part over with), I threw a Pokeball right at his big bicycle-horn nose. But as soon as it left my fingers, I realized that I didn't know which one I had thrown. It was a good throw. As soon as the thing hit his nose, it cracked wide open.

Before I saw anything, I smelled it. It was a smell like old teeth and rotten fish and sand. It was the smell of death.

Instead of its normal bright rays of light, the Pokeball began to ooze thick, black, nasty-smelling smoke. It creeped through the air like syrup creeps through water, and where the Pokemon should be, a shriveled stem thing, either burnt to a crisp or slimy and decayed (I couldn't tell which), grew, mostly blocked from my sight by the fumes. It rose up, bent, and broke. The broken half fell off the impossible landscape and into oblivion.

I still couldn't tell which Pokemon it was.

Desperately, I threw another one, not caring what was inside it, as long as it was alive. This one fell off completely.

Where were they all falling to? Why didn't I fall? I can't say. I was down to my last Pokeball.

I threw it. (Where was my common sense?) Thankfully, it stuck and opened, quite normally, in a flash of light. But I had thrown it too close to the where the first Pokeball opened, and the smoke covered everything. Heart-wrenchingly, all I saw was one reproachful eye before it was swallowed by the darkness. The eye could have belonged to any of them.

I took off my hat and bowed my head.

Then it began to rain Pokeballs. I didn't move, and I didn't want to. Mario, who I had completely forgotten about, gathered an armful of them and threw them into the air like a little kid throws confetti. Suddenly and irrationally, all the most powerful Pokemon in the world popped out. Although they didn't so much as look my way, it was obvious that to them, I was the enemy. While I was staring, Mario walked over to me and grabbed me by the collar (hell, I don't think I even wear collars).

_This world is not your world, _he hissed.

_You don't belong here. We don't play by your rules. You are nothing. _He gestured to the legendary Pokemon, every trainer's Holy Grail, gathered around him. _Without them, you are nothing. _If it was possible to spit without moving a muscle in your face, he spat.

_Why are the strong imprisoned by the weak? Why are the strong forced to fight until they are close to death, for the entertainment of the weak? Who gave the weak power? No one did. You are weak. You are powerless. Your rules are not our rules. Your little slaves would be much better off without you, or dead. Go back to the cesspit from whence you came, because you will never understand our world._

_Your world is a farce. A twisted, tragic, comedy. And you are a prime example of the filth it spawns._

I was pretty messed up. My Pokemon were gone. The most respected hero in the world was practically choking me. My Pokemon were gone. A whole pantheon of legendaries was giving me death glares. My Pokemon were gone, too, which made me want to give up and let him kill me. Sadly, Stupid Red, hidden in the corner of my mind, had other ideas. He thought this was by far the weirdest, most idiotic thing that ever happened to me, and he said so.

"MY world's a farce?"

Oh, me and my smart mouth. It was worth it, though. Mario's face twisted in anger; then whole scene twisted, and it was gone.

I was staring at the inside of a bag.

Told you so. But sometimes I still wonder.

(They said later that it wasn't hazing, just a kind of entry exam. You gotta be tough, they said. Tough on the inside.)

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**This chapter was hard to write (and rewrite, and re rewrite and re rerewrite), but I think it was worth it. **

**Coming up next, Lucas!**

**Review? Tell me if it was long enough?**


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